Club promotes girls’ interests in engineering, science, math

Hewitt-Trussville High’s Pink Engineers pose at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville.

Melanie Dimler knows what it’s like to work in a career where women are a minority. Before she became Hewitt-Trussville High School’s physics teacher five years ago, Dimler worked as an engineer for several years. Now she uses that experience to encourage female students who want to follow that same path.

“As a female in a male-dominated world, there are challenges, but these challenges can be overcome,” she said.

Dimler created the Pink Engineers, an HTHS club for girls with an interest in engineering and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. The club invites guest speakers to meetings and also goes on field trips to colleges and engineering firms, so graduating Pink Engineers have a good idea of what their future might look like.

“Now I know a lot more about what to expect when I go to college,” said senior Emma Burford, the group’s vice president.

Since she joined the Pink Engineers as a freshman, Burford said the club has helped her get a good idea of what she would like to be when she grows up. She will be studying mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama in the fall.

Since part of Dimler’s goal is to show her club members how engineers improve others’ lives, each year the Pink Engineers take on a service project with an engineering bent.

“We didn’t want to be just takers; we want to be givers … so every year part of our mission is to do at least one community outreach,” she said.

That outreach has included designing and fundraising to construct a new donation box for the Trussville Ecumenical Assistance Ministry (T.E.A.M.) and serving as role models for girls at Paine Intermediate to encourage STEM interests.

“I think our little girls helped our big girls as much as our big girls helped our little girls because they inspired each other,” Dimler said. “They serve as role models, and they support each other as a minority in that effort.”

However, at the beginning of 2016 the Pink Engineers took on a bigger, multi-year community project. Two years ago, HTHS science teacher Angie Simonetti took a trip to HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville and saw the Genome Walk, a lengthy trail shaped like a strand of DNA. The Genome Walk includes information about mapping the human genome, and Simonetti said she thought it would be a great idea to bring back to her classroom.

“It’s a fun game. It gets the kids involved. It teaches them many different levels and aspects of genes,” she said.

HudsonAlpha has made the design of the Genome Walk publicly available to encourage others to recreate it in new places, so Simonetti reached out to Dimler and the Pink Engineers. After a field trip to see the HudsonAlpha Genome Walk early this year, Dimler agrees the HTHS campus is the perfect place for a smaller Genome Walk.

“We thought this would be a good fusion of biology and engineering. If we can really get the girls involved in spearheading this project from beginning to end, they can see the process,” Dimler said.

“It would be so phenomenal to build this at the school,” Simonetti said.

The undertaking to create a Genome Walk is a much bigger project than the Pink Engineers have taken on so far. They’re working to get permission from Trussville City Schools to build on a portion of HTHS land, and they have to work out how to scale down the walk to fit their space.

Dimler said the Pink Engineers also will have to figure out costs and either raise the money, work with engineers willing to donate time and materials or discover a cheaper way to build the walk. It’s an important lesson about project management in the real world of engineering, as well as finding creative solutions.

“To get an engineering project done, you have to get the funding; you have to understand the constraints,” Dimler said. “Maybe we don’t have to get major construction involved. Maybe we can map out just a walkway and tape it off with rudimentary signs.”

The Genome Walk will be the first thing the Pink Engineers discuss when they meet again in the new school year. Dimler said she hopes to get project approval in the fall so the club can work on fundraising and their preliminary mapping throughout the 2016-17 school year. If all goes well, she’d like to construct a more permanent version the year after that.

Simonetti said the project would not only be practical experience for the girls, but also “a legacy at the school.”

“It just would look cool to have a big piece of DNA on the property,” she said.

Science classes at HTHS could obviously make use of the Genome Walk, but other classes and even other Trussville schools could visit to learn more about DNA. Dimler said she could also see it being a regular exercise trail for the community to walk and learn at the same time.

“I just think it’s a great project for the kids, for the school, for the community,” Simonetti said. “We’d love it if we had community involvement.”